Get a lift with a Camel! - Olympikcy!

Just in time for the end of the Olympics, we've found something Olympicky! Camel cigarettes were the secret ingredient to Olympic gold in 1935! Observe!

We found this ad in a 1935 copy of Fortune magazine, the favored periodical of the Monopoly guy. The ad clearly proves that Olympic speed skater Jack Shea used Camels as part of his post-race recovery regimen. They restore his "pep". See, cigarettes provide an "abundant supply of stamina and energy".

That's a laugh. Maybe it'll be funny to look up how Shea died. That should only take a second. Let's see.. clickety clack... aah here it is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Shea_(speed_skater)

Jack Amos Shea... mumble mumble... nickname "The Chief"... mumble mumble... American double-gold medalist... mumble mumble... died January 22, 2002, aged ninety-one. Say WHAT? Double you tee eff?

https://www.sports-reference.com/olympics/athletes/sh/jack-shea-1.html

Shea's son (1964 and 1968 Olympics) and grandson (2002 Olympics) were also Olympians, and it was just before the 2002 Olympics, where he would have watched his grandson win a gold in the skeleton event, if Jack hadn't died in a car accident shortly before the games. So, what took him out was a car accident. He didn't seem to suffer some dreary and horrible decline due to lung cancer.

Jeez. Even though this doesn't fit the conventional narrative, there's still not much reason to run out an begin a long and fruitful tobacco habit. But wow. Ninety-one.

Anyway, who else owed their lifelong success to Camels? A draftsman, a store manager, a tree surgeon, and this lady: Mrs. William Wetmore. See, since it was 1935, she didn't get to have a name. She was simply an appendage of her husband. And he, in turn, gave her a new appendage in the form of a new surname to replace the old clunky one she was born with: Wetmore. Man, I wish I could think of a joke about that, but nothing springs to mind. Ah well, I'm sure something will come up. So what did Missus Billy Wetmore do with all her Camel-fueled energy?

She was a... "New York society leader"? Good for her. The headlines are full of unfortunate stories about societies that wind up on the wrong side of the law because they don't have anyone to lead them. I don't know how many times this week I've read about misguided societies holding up liquor stores or shooting smack under a bridge. Damn shame. Thanks, Mrs. William Wetmore! And thank, you, Camels, for all our pep!

Oh yeah. The Camel Caravan is promoted at the bottom of the ad. That was a radio show. It sounded pretty much like you'd expect - tootling clarinets and horns that sound like they were recorded in somebody's nose. Here, smell for yourself. Hear for yourself. You're welcome!

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Mimeograph - Heeyyyyyy, huffin' copies!

Ow!!! My frikkin' pen tool! Okay, you better appreciate this. It's another ad from a 1935 issue of Fortune magazine - the daily news for the guy on the Monopoly cards.

Mimeographs. If you're Of A Certain Age, you'll recall that, before photochopiers were cheap,reliable, or even existed, if you wanted a duplicate of a document, you had a Mimeograph machine in your office. They printed in purple, for some reason (or, at least the one at my grammar school did), the copies came out really warm, and while they cooled, you could smell the solvent evaporating from the ink. When the teacher handed out new, uuh, "handouts", as she called them, you could whiff the solvent, and for some reason, most kids enjoyed that smell. It was probably benzine or something that slowly causes drain bamage or something. Anyway, muy broin forls foine..... guh.

So, yeah. Mimeograph.

Anyway, this ad is all about decorative frames and ornaments. Something like that could come in handy down the road. It had damn well BETTER, after all the selecting and pen tooling it took to extract the elements for harvesting. You're goddam welcome!

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Faces of the Month, March 1935 - Three profile pictures.

Have you misplaced your March, 1935 copy of Fortune magazine? Well, first off, shame on you. Second, you're in luck, because we've got ours! And, here are three profile pictures for your InstaFace account, in case you don't like InstaFace detecting your face and calling you out in all those police blotter photos. "(Your name here) is with local gas station robbery!"

Yep, that's real interesting stuff. Lady under a fish, old guy looking stiff, and a racing driver who looks like a less chipper version of Mr. Slugworth, from the 1971 Willy Wonka movie.

Anyway, you're probably simply vibrating in your chair, waiting for your new avatar / profile picture. Okay, simmer down. Here they are, and you're welcome!

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Fleischmann's Yeast - Kids are bastards.

"Hey there, Pimply Face!" Shouts a gang of schoolmates, led by Mickey Rooney. It's just one chapter in the age-old heritage of Taunting Poetry, wielded by history's greatest engine of incisive wordplay, asshole schoolkids in the cartoon world of advertising.

In the season 5 episode of The Simpsons, "The Last Temptation of Homer", for one reason and another, Bart has to get orthopedic shoes and huge glasses. Sherri and Terri shout "Nice glasses, four-eyes!" Not to be outdone, Nelson Muntz adds "Yeah! Nice shoes... uuh... two-feet." Even Nelson is cleverer than The Mickster and his little gang of lads, who only have enough skill points allocated to their "poetry and brinksmanship" ability category to come up with "Hey there, Pimply face!" This is well for Pimply Face, since, as any kid will tell you, being cleverly mocked stings far worse than the ridicule of a mediocre mind.

Only a few minutes after the confrontation do you think of a real good zinger. Isn't it always thta way? "Never saw so many pimples on one 'map'." Oooo, if only he had thought to hit old Map face with that one a few minutes ago! Next time for sure!

How things change! Only a couple of weeks eating yeast pucks, and Tom's map pimples have cleared up to the point that Mickey now wants to have sex with him! Good for them!

It's a well-known fact that Advertising is not above using paranoia and shame to sell products in the same way that the sea is not above the clouds, as Douglas Adams would put it. Far from it. Making you scared of other people is a well-worn arrow in the quiver of marketing's geniuses, and acne is a pretty good fear button to push with that ever-pointy arrow.

But "yeast cakes"? Double-you tee eff are yeast cakes? Well, most references to the idea of eating yeast to fight acne date back to 1920 or so. Apparently, brewer's yeast had some antibacterial properties, and if you ate a "cake" of the stuff with every meal, people thought it would help. This Fleischmann's ad is careful not to offer any real science, only mentioning "waste poisons" in the blood. Brewer's yeast is said to smell really bad, and taste even worse, so this may have something to do with it falling out of favor in the acne battle.

But enough of that. Check out Mickey Rooney and his gang of sociopaths! Yes, every human springs into the world a mean little jerk, and only through decades of careful guidance may they be cajoled out of a life of total bastardness. School kids are bastards, and school kids in the stereotype-heavy land of advertising are evil bastards. Let's put this little troop of evil bastards to good use! get your rude finger ready to right click these little bastards onto your hard drive's digital reform school in three, two, one, RIGHTCLICKNOW!

You can print them out and use them to decorate your kids' school pictures, or to highlight that one special item on the grocery list! Anything that needs mocking, these evil bastards are ready to do your dirty work for you. You're welcome!

Lifelike Robots to Take Over All Civilization!

Citizens, I hope you are all sitting down, for I have terror-clenching news to turn your blood Cold, and also clench it. A wicked Sculptor in Brooklyn, New York has built a mechanical automaton so completely lifelike that it - and others like it, surely to follow - will take over all forms of entertainment, and, in the ultimate Horror-situation, replace us all!

The machines of the recently-completed Industrial Revolution can do all of the Good Works of a Man, from threshing wheat to threshing children. This robot also replicates the Vital Functions of smoking and also fishing! What is to become of Our Civilization when such miracles such as this robot, which is indistinguishable from a Man in every way, become commonplace? Surely Man's technology has reached a dangerous Perfection. Is this the End of Science?

How will you know when your wife has been replaced with a smoking-and-fishing robot? How will you know when You Yourself have been so replaced? How, indeed, do you know it has not already happened? How???

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Shinola - Know things from it.

So, even if you're a millennial, and you think the universe began in 1990, you have probably heard a colloquialism implying the importance of knowing "shit from Shinola". If you've heard that, well done. "But," you may cry "what ever does it mean?". Cry no more, little one.

So, Shinola was a brand of shoe polish that, according to Wiktionary, had the look of poo. Missed opportunity. The makers of Shinola could have easily gone with the name "Shoe Poo". But anyway...

know shit from Shinola
A colloquialism which dates back to the early 1940s in the United States, sometimes ended with "that's why your shoes don't shine". Shinola was a popular brand of shoe polish, which had a color and texture not unlike feces.
Verb
know shit from Shinola(US) To have the most basic level of intelligence or common sense.

Well, that's another case wrapped up tight, but it does raise an odd question. Did Shinola, Inc. come up with this weird little swear-laden slogan? This seems unlikely, as the ad comes to us from a 1935 issue of Popular Mechanics, and swears were just as verboten in advertising as they are today. Hmm. Two things make me suspect it's from the military. Number A) shoe polish was important to those in the service - especially in decades past. Number B) soldiers love dirty talk. Let's see if The Ultranet knows anything. Phrases.org.uk seems to have an idea...

The 'ola' suffix is popular in the USA as part of trade names, e.g. Crayola, Granola etc. This leads to the pronunciation of Shinola as shine + ola. That spoils the alliteration a little as it would work better as shin + ola. 

This phrase is typical of the barrack room vulgarity of WWII, which is where it originated. Other "doesn't know" phrases, also mostly from the military are, "doesn't know his arse from a hole in the ground" (or elbow, or a hot rock, or third base), "doesn't know enough to pee downwind", "doesn't know whether to scratch his watch or wind his ass". The tone is lifted a little by the English conductor Sir Henry Wood who expressed a similar opinion with "he doesn't know his brass from his woodwind".

Aaaah, the good old military does not disappoint. If it's clever enough to be a jingle, but filthy enough to be funny, seek your answer in the armed forces.

But this 1935 Shinola ad is innocent. They're just selling shoe polish. The picture is interesting, though. She really likes the look of his super-shiny shoes.

That's quite a leer on that guy's mug. That's quite an appreciative lady sitting next to him. Good thing this picture isn't taken out of context or it could be really suggestive.

Hey! I got an idea! Let's take this picture out of context so it can be really suggestive! Phil Are GO! Graphic Blandishment and Photoshoppery Brigade! Assemble! PKSHOWW!!!


All right team! On my mark! Hut!

Make selection of dot pattern!...    Complete!
Copy dot pattern!...    Complete!
Fill in background behind man's head with dot pattern!...    Complete!
Improvise outline of man's hair!...    Complete!
Pattern Brush lady's dress where the tin overlaps it!...    Complete!
Pattern Brush man's suit where the tin overlaps it!...    Complete!
Crop image!...    Complete!

I don't know what you citizens will do with this newly enfilthened picture, but I hope you disappoint all your spouses and associates with your adolescent shenanigans. God's speed, prurient readers. You're welcome! Get your rude finger ready to right-click this naughty jpeg into your digital smut bucket in three, two, one, RIGHTCLICK NOW!

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Lifebuoy - Slinker and stinker.

You stink. If not now, then you will soon. We owe a debt of gratitude to marketing for teaching us that we stink, and we need to buy their product to fix it. Lifebuoy was - is! -  a soap company that, when I first heard of them, I thought was called "Life Boy". More on that later. Here's the dramatic ad from 1935.

Life Buoy is careful to make clear in the very first panel that they are married. As we read on, it becomes obvious that the only reason Wife didn't marry that other loser is because he stank. Soon, we learn that if you stink, you can't smell your own stink. The happy ending is a relationship based on the bedrock of not stinking. Surely their love will stand the test of time...

"Oh, darling. Do you remember that marvelous evening we spent sipping champagne under the lights of the Eiffel Tower? It was ever so non-smelly! Truly it was!"

"How could I forget? Just as I cannot forget the week we spent in that quaint villa in Mallorca with your parents. The sands were so odor-free. I could hardly believe the lack of stink. It was grand. The gulls were especially odorless as they danced above the sparkling water."

"My love, let's never have an odor! Never ever!"

"Oh, we shan't, my dear. Never a whiff. To this I pledge."


To sum up, the message of the ad is this:
1) If you stink, you won't know it.
2) If you stink, you will never find love.
3) Unless you use Life Buoy, items 1 and 2 are certain. So, be constantly afraid of them and use Life Buoy.

When A Christmas Story appeared on HBO in 1982, I had never seen anything so funny before, (except for maybe Monty Python, and Mom would have flipped if she found out my brother let me watch it with him). A Christmas Story was the first time I had ever heard of Life Buoy soap, and the auto-correct in my young brain made it into "Life Boy". Why would I hear it differently? I did know what a "buoy" was, but the circular flotation device you throw to a drowning person was a thing I understood to be a "life preserver". A "buoy" was floating marker weighing hundreds of pounds, with a bell and maybe a light on it that you find tethered in a harbor or something. I had no idea what a "life buoy" was. In my mind, if you threw a buoy at a person who fell overboard, you would stand a good chance of killing them. Also, in the movie, narrator Gene Shepherd (from Indiana) pronounced the phrase exactly like "life boy", while my Chicagoan family pronounced the word more like "boo-wee".

There's a fairly great podcast produced by the CBC (Canadian broadcasting Company) called Under the Influence. It's written and hosted by Terry O'Reilly, an actual ad man of many years. He did an episode on "the marketing of shame", and how shame is a thing that sort of doesn't exist any more. This episode covers the invention of "B.O." in the 1800s. It's really interesting. He even uses a Life Buoy ad as the thumbnail for the episode.

http://www.cbc.ca/radio/undertheinfluence/shame-the-secret-tool-of-marketing-1.2801801

One of the things from one of my former relationships that I recall with some degree of pride is that my ex-girlfriend (at the time, just my "girlfriend") once told me that she had never smelled my B.O. Apparently, I never stank. Hooray for preventative shame. At least I got that right.

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Crane's Papers - Would that I needed paper.

This 1935 ad from Crane's Papers is an object lesson in why Art Deco was pretty much the best design style humanity ever came up with. This ad is so beautiful, it's like they don't even need my business!

 In case you don't see what all the fuss is about, here are the highlights.

-The wide margins and generous use of "negative space" imply a relaxed luxury. It's like the art doesn't feel the need to fill up every available corner of the page.

-The thin lines aren't shouty. This makes the art feel dignified. It's not trying to leap off the page at you. Notice it or don't. It doesn't care one way or the other.

-The picture doesn't seem to have any direct relation to the product. You have to read the copy to get it. "Our paper goes all over the world, constantly." But with a picture that pretty, we hardly care if it relates to the product or not.

Mostly, the text in the ad brags about Cranes' achievements at market domination. I guess they really don't need our business. The bottom line is, the ad mirrors their attitude, and that's this: "Wouldn't you feel better using Crane's than the loser paper you have now?" I'm inclined to agree.

Believe it or not, Crane's is still around (http://www.crane.com/), but it seems that the look of their site, which in the modern world is the front door of your company, has lost a lot of the grandeur and class they had in 1935. Better get on that shit, Crane's.

Eveready Batteries - Quick and easy.

If you ever find yourself the J. Jonah Jameson of a media empire based on looking at old magazines, and if you ever find yourself needing a quick post that's still worth posting, I have some advice. Just reach for your stack of Fortune magazines from the 1930s. yes, they're a pain to scan because their ancient bindings can barely stand to be opened flat on the scanner, and images routinely run deep into the groin between two pages. But, if your Images and Scanning Them squad has the patience and a light touch, Fortune was pretty much jammed cover to cover with gorgeous eye candy.

Today, we have this full page watercolor for Eveready batteries from 1935. It doesn't make me want to run right out and fill my trunk with batteries, but in this ad, Eveready is playing the long game, going for the soft sell. The objective here is the "Eveready love has plussed one!" feeling. It's all cozy and stuff, with a grandpa explaining geography to his grandchildren with the help of an Eveready flashlight.

Or, you can think of it as a rich, demonic robber baron explaining to his grandchildren how the whole of humanity will be subjugated to his will, once he completes the construction of his sun blocker, plunging the world into shadow, and he alone will control the light. It is Fortune magazine, after all. We can also assume that, once grandpa has finished the sun blocker demonstration, he would lead the kids in a rousing chorus of "mu-hu-ha-ha-ha-ha" practice.

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Lucky Strike - A first time for everything.

The Phil Are GO! Content Acquisition Team dropped this in my desk this morning. It is the least stupid and not insulting cigarette ad I have ever seen. There's no made up  pseudoscience about "your T zone", or bogus appeal to authority using smoking doctors. Of course, the ad isn't doing much, because there's just not much to be done, without lying to people. Picture of person. Picture of product, hoping you'll make the association and believe that if you use one you can get the other.

Of course, the idea of smoke ""tasting better" is a little weird, to the eyes of a non-smoker, but I suppose it can be true. "Better" is a comparative word, and therefore, subjective. It can't be proven or disproven.

But look at her, whoever she is, looking all "I don't need your stupid whatever you got". She doesn't make me want to pick up smoking, (especially when you think what her mouth must smell like) but she maybe makes me want to start my own auto repair business so I can tear out her page and put it on the wall next to the nail holding up the strap wrench.

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The Restaurant Sketch (Heinz Soups)

Joke #1 - "'Apple-Pay, sir? I am unfamiliar with this currency, sir. Our restaurant usually accepts currency in the form of 'money pay', sir."

Joke #2 - "The soup is marvelous tonight! Did the chef put an extra orphan in it?"

Joke #3 - "I am most dreadfully sorry, sir. It seems that our head chef has compromised your personal finance data and your accounts are now all wiped. Shall I tell our dish washing staff that sir will be assisting them this evening, sir?"

Joke #4 - "Just the soup for me, waiter. However, my wifedaughter will have another glass of air, if you please."

Joke #5 - "Sir, a rather large group of little rascals are asking to join you this evening, sir."

Joke #6 - "Sir, the three chefs send their best to your wife. Their message was rather stooge-like, I'm afraid. I believe it was 'nyang nyang' and 'woo woo woo woo woo', sir."

Joke #7 - "Very well, sir. And now, if you please, I must step aside, as I believe a gentleman... an 'Indianapolis Johnson' or some such... would like to crash through your table and mumble something about being 'too old for this' while a rather large gem skitters across the dance floor for some reason."

Joke #8 comes to us from Jim D, who reserved a table for twice as many people as actually showed up. Thanks a LOT, Jim! "No, I don't believe it . . . Taster's Choice, you say?"

[Commenter jokes will be added to the post.]

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1935 Buick - Star style.

It's been a while since we've featured a decogasm here, what with all the goofy inventions and spurious ad copy to be ridiculed. Let's point our eye-holes at some bonkers luxury, shall we? It's time for a decogasm. get ready for your brain to make a gooey mess all over the inside of your skull. Behold this frikkin swanky ad for the 1935 Buick. Phwoooaaaah!

This ad comes to us from the March, 1935 issue of Fortune magazine, which, considering the year and target demo, was basically the daily read of Mister Monopoly, formerly "Rich Uncle Pennybags", renamed by Hasbro some time in the 2000s. I like the old name better.

Man, like that's a lot of pinanos. What do fifty-whatever pinanos even sound like? Why do you need fifty-whatever pinanos in a print ad anyway? Well, this ad was run in cross-promotion with a film, Gold Diggers of 1935, which was directed by Busby Berkeley. Aaaaaaaahh, that explains the kooky overproduction. If his name is unfamiliar, just understand that every "homage" or "retro" musical number you see in a music video or movie is more or less a sendup of the style of musical production made famous by Busby Berkeley. Madonna's Material Girl video and the goofy opening sequences to the Austin Powers movies? Those are tributes to the Busby Berkeley style. Rows and rows of kicking dancers. Curving staircases. Fountains. Maybe a couple of kitchen sinks.

Here's something you see a LOT of in old photograhps. They didn't have Photoshop, right? So, they'd de-ambiguize objects in dark shadows. The edge of the car's tire wasn't really clear in the original photo, so a photo retoucher went in with an airbrush (an actual airbrush, children!) and sprayed some medium gray over a round frisket, to define the edge of the tire. My brain doesn't care. I don't need to see the edge of the tire. I know tires are round, and the airbrushing leaps out at me as being distracting. But, it's an interesting part of techno-history.

I don't care about musicals, and cars this old don't really warm my blood, but the visual composition of each scene in this movie are beautiful. If I may go way out on a limb, it occurs to me that there's a modern movie with similar attention to the beauty of each scene as an artistic layout: The Matrix. That movie is a study in visual composition in the same way as Gold Diggers of 1935, at least to my eye. I kind of want to watch both movies in one weekend, just to find the edges of this theory of mine.You can watch the whole Gold Diggers movie on FaceTube - it's just chopped up into ten minute segments is all. Or you can stream it from Asthmazon, Google Play or Vudu, it seems. Here's the trailer. Now that I watch that, another though occurs. Women in these movies plucked the shit out of their eyebrows! It's a bad look. Ladies, men aren't into Sharpie eyebrows. Stop it.

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